As our friends at Stateline.org report this morning, spurred by a reduction in power-plant emissions, governors from Virginia to New Jersey have jointly committed last to come up with a plan to cap transportation emissions. That will probably happen by charging fuel distributors and using the profits to invest in cleaner alternatives, Stateline reports.

As Stateline reports, the states were moved to act by a startling statistic: Transportation accounts for about 40 percent of carbon emissions in the Mid-Atlantic, federal data shows.

The Mid-Atlantic leaders are hardly reinventing the wheel here. As Stateline notes, California is a trailblazer in this effort.

And many East Coast states are already part of an effort called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or “Reggie,” because everything has to have an adorable nickname. Since 2009, the program has “capped the overall carbon dioxide produced by power plants and required plant operators to buy permits for their emissions,” Stateline reported.

More from Stateline:

"Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, has led the charge on this new effort. He said in a statement that “reducing transportation emissions is imperative to combating the causes of climate change and meeting Massachusetts’ aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets.”

"Now nine states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia — plus Washington, D.C., have committed to a “RGGI redux” for transportation. Participants are hopeful that New York and Maine also will join the group.

"Although critics say market forces are mostly responsible for the reduction in power plant emissions, environmentalists and the participating states consider RGGI a success.

“The reason RGGI is so popular and so successful is that we’re using revenue generated from pollution and investing it back into solving the problem,” said Chris Bast, chief deputy director of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality. “We’re going to be spending the next year figuring out how we apply the same concept to transportation problems.”

(Courtesy of Stateline.org) Stateline.org

In Pittsburgh last week, Wolf noted that the threat posed by greenhouse gas emissions is "not an abstract problem. [Last year] 2018 was the wettest year on record with flooding. That’s affected our farms. It’s devastated homes. This is affecting all of our lives each and every day.”

As The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, Wolf wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent by 2025, and by 80 percent, by 2050, from 2005 levels. Those are the same goals that the state Department of Environmental Protection wrote into its draft climate change action plan last year, the newspaper reported.

Wolf’s targets, while ambitious, also “mirror federal projections for what it will take to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the international consensus threshold for avoiding the worst effects of climate change, although devastating changes are expected to start with even less warming,” The Post-Gazette reported.